Two weeks after the Great Tohoku earthquake followed by the devastating tsunami, we have sent open-ended questionnaires to a randomly selected sample of Twitter users and also analysed the tweets sent from the disaster-hit areas. We found that people in directly affected areas tend to tweet about their unsafe and uncertain situation while people in remote areas post messages to let their followers know that they are safe. Our analysis of the open-ended answers has revealed that unreliable retweets (RTs) on Twitter was the biggest problem the users have faced during the disaster. Some of the solutions offered by the respondents included introducing official hash tags, limiting the number of RTs for each hash tag and adding features that allow users to trace information by maintaining anonymity.

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This study addresses incidental advertising exposure effects in online games by manipulating both the location (low proximity versus high proximity) and the message content (visual versus verbal) of an incidental cue while participants' primary attention is diverted by playing an online game. The results reveal that incidental exposure can be effective if the secondary stimulus appears very close to the focal attention area. The study also finds no incidental effects of text inside bars or images in address bars.

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This study was undertaken to investigate the impact of other respondents' answers on individual responses in survey studies. The study employed four different conditions and manipulated the direction and the level of social pressure. The results have confirmed that social desirability bias hugely impacts individual answers. It was found that respondents are seven times more likely to choose a socially unacceptable option if majority of the preceding respondents also have chosen the same option. Additionally, the existence of an interviewer during data collection was found to be a factor pressuring respondents to give more socially acceptable responses.